Setup your WordPress blog for Mobiles using W3 Total Cache

Mobile optimization for any blog is as important as desktop optimization. With the huge percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices, it is worth enough to design and configure your blog for mobiles also. A well configured and designed blog for mobile devices can boost your revenue up-to 25% if it has a decent percentage of visitors coming from mobiles.

Another important thing is Google AdSense for Content doesn’t shows ads on mobiles, so if you use AdSense on your blog but don’t use AdSense for Mobile Content then you are not getting the most from your blog. Here I’ll explain how to set up and optimize your blog for mobiles and tablets.

There are many plugins in the WordPress plugins directory that can help you configure your site for mobile devices. One thing that many of this plugins doesn’t offer is they don’t support caching for mobiles and as you know this may slow down your site. So here I’m going to give you step by step guide to configure your blog for mobiles using W3 Total Cache plugin.

W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins for caching your WordPress site and seed that up. It has many features including caching for mobiles and switching to a different theme for mobiles. If you use this plugin, then you don’t have to use any other mobile plugin to configure your site for mobiles.

How to set up W3 Total Cache for Mobiles

After you install and activated W3 Total Cache plugin you can see a Performance tab in the sidebar of your WordPress admin dashboard. Expand that and click on User Agent Groups. This section allows you to select what you want to do with visitors using different devices and browsers. Whether it is a mobile device or tablet, whether the browser the user have is Opera Mini or iPhone OS 3.

What this User Agent Groups option does is – it filters the visitors of your site by their browser’s User Agent Strings using the .htaccess file. So you can redirect your visitors to another theme by filtering their browser and device.

By default W3 Total Cache has two built in user groups. One of this group is set for filtering high end smart-phone like iPad, iPhone, Android or latest Blackberry models and the other group is set for lower end feature phones using browser like Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and many more.

To filter your user by their browser or device just click on the Enabled check-box under the group name in the User Agent Groups and select your theme that you want to use for this group.

Just upload your specially designed theme for mobiles or tablets to the wp-content/themes and you will see your themes in the drop-down menu for user agent groups. Select the appropriate theme and click on Save All Setting at the bottom. You may need to deploy your setting if you have preview mode enabled on your W3 Total Cache setting. Now your site is ready for mobile visitors too. Making a good mobile theme can really boost your traffic and earnings.

You can add your own user group like a group for Nokia phones, a group for Blackberry phones or a group only for iPhone to customize your filter.

To check whether your settings are working or not visit your site using a mobile device or download the Opera Mobile Emulator or the best option use User Agent Switcher plugin in Firefox.